6.30.2010

letters to juliet: fluff, cheese and little hearts aflutter

My first thought: "Old people can be so sweet!" (As quoted by Cher Horowitz in Clueless.)

Met C, my oldest best friend (in terms of years we've been friends - since I was 2, and she was 3), on Tuesday night for dinner and a chick flick; movies of that variety tend to dominate our film-watching choices when we're not attending the cinema with her boy... the last was When In Rome starring Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel. Sappy romance or generic female audience-targeted films are always a delight with C, because we've watched so many together that we know what the other is thinking when a particularly cheesy bit comes on, or a tragic heartbreaking bit.
In the case of Tuesday night, we bought tickets for Letters to Juliet. Starring Amanda Seyfried, Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Egan, the romance film is about Sophie, an American fact-checker at the New Yorker who heads to Verona, Italy, for a pre-wedding "honeymoon" with her slightly overly-gourmet-obsessed chef fiancé who wants to spend the whole trip visiting his suppliers. Sophie befriends the Secretaries of Juliet, who write back to the women who have written letters and put them up on the exterior garden wall of the house Juliet Capulet used to live in. While helping these women answer the letters, she discovers a Letter to Juliet written in 1957 somewhere in the wall and writes back... the author of the letter, Claire, comes to Italy to find the love she left behind more than five decades ago and Sophie tags along on her journey for what she feels to be the story she's always wanted to write, where "it's never too late", and people just need to "find the courage" to pursue their dreams. And of course, Claire has a good-looking and overprotective grandson, Charlie, whom Sophie begins to have verbal sparring matches with almost immediately after their first meeting. As the sparks fly, and Sophie realises what she wants, hearts are torn and sewn back and the audience gets a little more faith in the power of love.
Overall, the story was a little difficult to believe, and the time-frame was unrealistic (I am a cynic in real life, and do not believe that people may fall in love at first sight, or even over the span of a few days), but the film's really supposed to be all romance, sweet lighthearted fluff. And there's plenty of humour to satisfy the cynics. Needless to say, we loved the settings, the romance and Amanda Seyfried's perfect hair and sometimes very spot-on outfits. Watch it if you need a pick-me-up, or some reassurance that love might be waiting in very strange places for you.
6.5/8.0